“The attitude of the United States and Western Europe to Stalinism and its opponents is often questionable.

The bulk of American intellectuals stopped hailing Alexander Solzhenitsyn as a hero dissident back in the 1970s, when he questioned the perfection of the modern type of liberal democracy in his Harvard lecture.

The Western media often quoted John Paul II at the beginning of his papacy, when he mostly criticized the communist regime in Poland and other Soviet bloc countries. But when late in his life he turned his wrath on capitalism and its irresponsible way of life, his criticism was either disregarded or provoked evil attacks against him.

When Solzhenitsyn remained a patriot of Russia even under Putin, the West stopped writing about him at all.

The only Russian the West still respects is Andrei Sakharov, an eminent Soviet nuclear physicist, dissident and human rights activist, but that is only because he died in 1989. Given the current ideological intolerance in the United States and Western Europe, he and his convergence theory would have long been denounced.

In essence, the theory proposes that capitalism and communism – driven by the irresistible scientific and technological forces that control modern industrial states – will eventually coalesce into a new form of society, blending the personal freedom and profit motive of Western democracies with the communist system’s government control of the economy.

Moreover, Western attitude to anti-Stalinist literature has recently deteriorated. The dramatic reduction of allocations to Slavic studies in the West, from Vancouver to Tokyo, after the disintegration of the Soviet Union showed that the West needed poets Boris Pasternak and Marina Tsvetayeva only for political reasons. This is evidence that a free Russian literature has no independent value for an overwhelming majority of Western decision-makers.”